Theme 1 - reflection

During the first week, the week of theme 1, I read the two texts: Plato’s Theaetetus and the Preface to the second edition of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I must admit that reading these two texts was a really had task for me, as I have never studied any philosophy before. I read the texts but felt like I did not quite understand the full meaning of either one of them, but thanks to the lecture and the seminar things became a bit clearer to me.

During the lecture Johan mentioned sources of our knowledge today, which are mostly based upon naturalism and scientism. This made me reflect about the evolution of knowledge over the years which I think is rather interesting. The general concept of empiricism is something that I really believe in and agree with, and as far as I can see it is the most logical way of obtaining information about the environment and the world we live in. Now this is sort of the opposite of what we talked about during the seminar. Much of the time during the seminar was spent talking about a priori knowledge, which is a concept I had a hard time grasping.

To sum up the week, I have gained a lot of new insight and knowledge about subjects which I was not very familiar with earlier. I have also improved my ability to see things from a different perspective, which is quite necessary, considering the different style of this course compared to the more traditional ones.